I come from a family
of literary people on my father’s side, several of them pioneers.
One of them, a favourite cousin, introduced me to Shakespeare when I
was nine, and I enjoyed the plays with her at Stratford every year.
When I was eleven, my father was ill and asked me to read to him
from Malory: without any didactic intention he opened another door
on what were to be lifelong interests. At the time that I went to
University, my grandfather spent his winters with us, and he and I
could share our interest in the history of the English language. He
had risen from a working-class background in Birmingham, England, to
read English at Birmingham’s newly founded Mason College, and he
taught in its English department for seven years before moving on in
1898 to become a pioneer in education. One of my cached papers on
this website is about his life.

By
chance, it was in my grandfather’s English department that my own
research began, when I was engaged on a Ph D at Birmingham
University in 1971. I was fortunate in having Professor Geoffrey
Shepherd as my supervisor: it was he who persuaded me to make the
medieval romances my area of work rather than linguistics, and he
later supported my wish to investigate the curious plots I was
finding in some of my texts.

I
was at Manchester University for my first degree, and owe to its
powerful English Language department of the 1950’s my preference for
language study over literary criticism. But I didn’t want to stay on
to do research at that time, and spent the later 1950’s and 1960’s
living and working abroad. I spent a year in Finland teaching
English and travelling, enjoying the languages of Scandinavia and
taking a train to Moscow and Leningrad. Then, during a decade in
Malawi with my partner Anthony, I became interested in the Bantu
family of languages and attempted a description of the
little-studied language Elomwe. Political and personal circumstances
prevented me from completing this work – a matter much on my mind
when I made inquiries at Birmingham University. By the time we
arrived in Birmingham in 1969, living just up the road from the
University, I had three children.

At
Birmingham, I abandoned my original subject of Festivals in medieval
texts when I became absorbed in the logical problems presented by
many of the romances I was working on. It was the plot of ‘King
Horn’ which caught my attention particularly. This plot had the
appearance of a formal sequence of repetitions and yet it took its
hero on an unnecessarily circuitous route to his princess and
kingdom, and the motives of its characters were impenetrable;
motivation in this plot seemed not just neglected but apparently
determined not to make sense. The hero was a king’s son, orphaned by
Saracens, who became a much loved retainer at the court of King
Aylmer whose daughter fell in love with him. However, he was in
disguise as a thrall – an unexplained handicap which he didn’t
discard with this change of fortune. His companion Fikenild then
told the king that Horn was planning to kill him and marry the
princess. Horn was exiled and arrived at the court of King Thurston
under the name of Goodmind, where he saved the king from an invader
and refused the reward of the king’s daughter and kingdom. He could
then return to Aylmer’s court bolder and become betrothed to his
princess. After this he left to win back his father’s kingdom, and
he then returned to find that his accuser Fikenild had built a
castle and was planning to seize the princess from the cowed king.
Horn killed him and married his princess. Horn was a hero who set
out on his path to victory by putting obstacles in his own way and
yet his being a thrall had an air of being an important step in his
progress. He was accused of treachery at one court and then
immediately played the opposite role at another under the name
‘Goodmind’ (‘Cutbeard’ in some King Horn texts). From that point he
went on to win his princess and his father’s kingdom, but there was
a further, absurd task to be carried out before the marriage. His
accuser Fikenild became the traitor he had accused Horn of being and
managed to build a castle and terrify King Aylmer. Horn killed him
and then the marriage took place.

An
experience of psychoanalysis attracted me initially to these plots,
and it was psychoanalysis which first suggested my experiment with
the single point of view. My efforts at trying to make sense of the
plots had become increasingly chaotic, and I decided one morning
that if I was going to get order into my work I must make a decision
about points of view. In the Freudian approach to dreams, there is
only one point of view, that of the dreamer. These days, dreaming
tends to be seen in terms of brain function rather than
wish-fulfilment, as having something to do with rehearsing memories
or neural programmes, but the Freudian approach was useful to me,
because experimentation with the single point of view made the
repeat scenes – the ‘move structure’ as I was to call it – clearly
visible. I thought the single point of view and the step-by-step
structure of each plot would lead to an ordered investigation, and
this is what they eventually did, but they were to do so by slowly
revealing plots of remarkable character, power and elegance which
had never been suspected before and couldn’t be explained by
anything we knew.

Psychoanalysis has certainly been concerned with unconscious
conflicts, but it has never been interested in structure in
unconscious activity: it has been concerned with the unconscious
only in fragments as it intrudes on our conscious, social world,
raising questions about such things as our motives and our mental
health. By contrast, in the narrative texts I have been working on
we can sometimes find a complete sequence of unconscious thought,
and observe its operation without interference from our conscious
minds. The sequence has no awareness of the presence of any other
narrative in the text; consciousness is absent, and the sequence is
alone in its own domain, dealing effectively with its own concerns
in its own way. These were ideal conditions for my investigation
into structure. The ‘language’ used by these narratives was unknown,
of course, but the move sequences were my guide, and their
step-by-step progression instilled into me the importance of
addressing all the details in the order in which they appeared,
while the single point of view ensured that I addressed each of
these narratives as a product of living thought, active and
creative, pursuing a purpose, finding means, selecting its
materials. A world never dreamed of in psychoanalysis very, very
slowly emerged.

At
the early, Ph D, stage, it was my work on the plot of ‘King Horn’
which impressed the examiners. My external examiner was Derek
Brewer, and his new publishing venture took the risk of bringing out
my first book, Traditional Romance and Tale, in 1976. It’s hard to
imagine what would have happened to my project had it not been for
his courage at that point. He thought that my work made more sense
of the Horn plot than previous attempts to explain it, and that the
material in my thesis should be published, with the helpful use of
some better-known texts. He told me that if I couldn’t find another
publisher, he would take the book on and this is what happened.
However, the scholars didn’t accompany me in my exploration of the
plot structures. They would become interested in ‘family drama’, a
subject pursued by using interpretation on the basis of an
established theory (psychoanalysis), while my continued
investigation of the structures enabled me to work out new methods
for a pioneering investigation into unconscious narrative.

Learning to address these unconscious structures would mean learning
a new language, a language in which the deeper mind thought and
talked to itself. My work resembled a deciphering job, one which
required me to read the close relationships between the details in
the order in which they appeared. The deciphering proceeded very
slowly, because I had to learn everything from scratch, and it took
me a dozen years to see just what I would have to do and whether it
was feasible. The emerging structures taught me all I know about
them. Their narratives advanced in a sequence of repetitive steps,
which I called ‘moves’ though they were different in kind and much
more frequent than those of Vladimir Propp. Each move depended on
the performance of the previous move, and sometimes they were
replays using surrogate characters to reverse the action of the
previous move (as in the case of Horn’s Goodmind move). The key to
the structure was the single point of view, notionally in the mind
of the hero or heroine of the plot. As I worked on text after text,
each having its own individual organisation, I refined my questions
and methods of analysis, and my grasp of what these structures were
doing altered. I needed to work on a great many texts, while only a
certain number proved relevant to my investigation. I wasn’t aware
in the early years that I was using models, these models being plots
still undergoing decipherment themselves. Move structures make
excellent models, and I was the only person to use them.

After my Ph D, I taught for the Open University and also in a
further education college, and I continued my investigation in the
Birmingham University Library. The most useful approach at this time
was to give attention to texts in which I thought there might be two
levels of narrative using the same material, one of them being one
of my unconscious plots and the other the author’s conscious work.
Jane Eyre was a key text taking me forward in this exploration, and
it was also this text which prompted me to see how organised the
unconscious plot was, as if it were performing a sequence of rituals
using magic. I knew very little about magic at this time beyond the
fact that it had to be highly organised, but as I looked into the
subject more I came to a clearer view of how my plots might be using
magic, even describing them as ‘magical’ before deciding eventually
that it would be more helpful to emphasise their ritual nature.
During this time, I still had some institutional support in the
kindly help of Professor Shepherd and he guided me during my initial
struggles with the Hamlet text of Saxo Grammaticus, a plot I
couldn’t solve until I had had nearly twenty years’ experience with
move structures. When he died in 1983, I lost a friend and adviser
who would not be replaced: I would never again enjoy the advice and
challenge of a fellow medievalist who understood so well what I was
trying to address.

Every pioneering venture has its wilderness, and also its lifesaving
strokes of good fortune. The Thimble Press, run by Nancy and Aidan
Chambers, bravely rescued my second book, Magical Thought in
Creative Writing, in 1983, and their publication brought my work to
wider attention, and also enabled me to continue working. I was to
have the further enjoyment of publishing articles with them in their
journal Signal: Approaches to Children’s Books. Then Birmingham
University’s Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities
(later, ‘in Arts and Social Sciences’) was founded, and I was
elected a Fellow in 1985. Few independent scholars are so fortunate,
because very few universities think of having such an institute,
where local scholars not employed in a university can be given
academic support.

After the publication of my second book, I was liberated to move on.
I had found my publishing problems paralysing, and the nuisance was
to haunt me throughout my career. Nobody could recognise my results,
and no wonder: they had never seen anything like them before. As I
set out on the next stage of my research, I gave up my teaching to
give myself more time for it, a risk which could be taken because my
partner was my warmest supporter and much more gainfully employed
than I could be. I now took the bold step of moving into the
speciality of the French scholars, and also into German, Swedish and
Latin texts, and my progress accelerated. The challenge of the
languages had to be confronted, and I wished the specialists would
join me, but my reward was texts full of magnificent detail which
helped me to refine my methods. During four exciting years, I
studied the conflicts I saw between two levels of narrative in
distinguished texts. I also discovered the value of working on
groups of texts using the same plot.

Working on groups of texts using the same unconscious plot was one
of the most significant developments as I was able to explore what
happened to a particular plot in several different texts using it. A
case in point was the five Lady of the Fountain texts, where
Chrétien de Troyes gave us the original, Ivain, and it was followed
by English, German and Swedish versions, and a Welsh version less
close to Chrétien’s. These studies revealed that the plot always
retained its structure, while the upper material might be worked or
reworked by each author at a conscious level in a variety of ways.
In the case of each of these texts, the result was a set of
inconsistencies between the two levels, revealed at the upper level.
Meanwhile, in the group as a whole, the inconsistencies were
different from one text to the next. The potential implication of
this was that, whatever the function of the lower level – ‘the
ritual narrative’ – assuming it had a function, it appeared to be
part of a system in the human brain, and highly conserved. The
implications of this pointed beyond literature, perhaps even to
physiology.

At
this stage, I also identified two radically new kinds of plot which
I called the purification plot and the defended narrative. The Horn
plot I now called a sovereignty plot, and the purification plot had
a similar move structure, but one designed exclusively to remove
anxiety. The defended narrative didn’t have a move structure to help
me, and I didn’t grasp this structure until I returned to ‘Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight’ for a new study fifteen years after my
first attempt. My work always required my having a clear visual
image of my plots, and the Green Knight plot came to me quite
suddenly in a mental picture of an adventure surrounded by
safeguards. The safeguards were constructed by narrative, the
beheading game bargain providing a secure framework removing danger
from the adventure with the lady. But my results were becoming
increasingly extraordinary, making considerable demands on readers
who had not had the gradual induction I had had into the emerging
material.

The need to publish once again came in 1987, but this time an old
friend, David Blamires in the German Department at Manchester
University, was in a position to help, and my third book, The
Magical Quest, was published by Manchester University Press in 1988.
David had given me moral support and advice from the very beginning,
and he recognised early that I was engaged on a real investigation.
This was to be my last publication for many a long year, apart from
one article, but the work continued, and I was giving papers at
conferences and in English departments during this time. I was now
enjoying the companionship of many fellow medievalists, however
baffled they might quite reasonably have felt by my contribution.
Eventually I was to meet Mildred Leake Day and her delightful Latin
romances, all of them bringing fresh and original inspiration into
my life. What I needed above all was the sustaining enthusiasm of
people who also worked on the texts, and this is what Mildred has
given me.

The research which led to my fourth book, Plots and Powers, set out
at once to study groups of texts using the same narrative material.
These groups had much to teach me, especially the Tristan Verse
Romances where only some of the texts included a ritual sequence. My
new models of the purification plot and defended narrative opened up
new exploration, and I became more able to formulate a methodology
for my results; another step forward was that I became able to
express my findings in chart-form. The book was completed in 1994
and was rejected by a great many publishers before appearing with
the University Press of Florida in 2001. This time, it was Peter Stockham, of the Staffs Bookshop in Lichfield, who, shortly before
he died, saw to it that his academic contacts in the USA knew my
book was looking for a publisher. During the long search for a
publisher, Maldwyn Mills, professor of English at the University of
Wales, Aberystwyth, kindly agreed to be my reader, and he made
important suggestions for the book, especially in relation to the
Hamlet chapter. While publishers’ rejections continued, I could feel
more relaxed about the possibility of my not being around to see the
book through to publication. With the publication of Plots and
Powers, the main body of my work had seen the light of day, and I
could only feel grateful: mine was difficult stuff to market, in
spite of the modern texts I was able to include.

Although it was published so late, the fourth book appeared before
it was possible for me to settle on a working explanation for my
ritual narratives. I couldn’t retire from the project before I could
supply helpful suggestions, at least. Where would the narratives
come from in the mind and why would they appear – only occasionally
– in our literature? These were questions which I couldn’t find
answers to on my own, but from 1995 I’ve had an invaluable colleague
in John Cummins, who came across my second book in a second-hand
bookshop on the Walls in Chester and contacted me. John Cummins was
engaged on an investigation into how the evolving human brain dealt
with the stress caused by its increasing ability to think and
anticipate the future. Stress could have prevented further
development, but the brain found ways of adapting its stress
response. As we’ve worked on in our own fields, we’ve exchanged
information and explored questions. John has suggested that my
ritual narratives might be regular re-runs of long-past mental
stages, and housekeeping algorithms operating at the edge between
things staying the same and things changing. Such narratives would
be an automatic process performing a function in the mind almost
structural in nature, promoting stability in a complex and dynamic
system such as the brain. John also introduced me to the
inter-disciplinary Journal of Consciousness Studies and other
literature belonging to the recent advances in our understanding of
the brain, but it was he himself who provided the forum in which I
could move forward to grasping where the answers to my questions
probably lay. To enjoy the forum of the Journal, I would need the
strong support of my colleagues which I still didn’t have. John
helped me to prepare an explanation for my colleagues of where my
work stood in relation to that of consciousness studies. What had
interested him in my work was that it offered studies of structure
in unconscious activity: I had identified and described unconscious
thought structures, observing their non-rational progression to a
non-rational conclusion. Recently John introduced me to Chris Nunn,
who had just published From Neurons to Notions (2007), a liberating
book offering a fascinating model of the mind. It helped me to think
practically about the origins of deeper narratives and how they
might emerge in texts. Another valuable colleague is Hugh Crago,
psychotherapist and literary scholar in Australia, who has shown me
parts of his forthcoming book on storytelling: his work is giving me
a larger ability to think about unconscious, not necessarily
structured, stories we live by.

This website is, in a sense, a fifth publication. Among my reasons
for setting it up is the need to present my published work as steps
in a single investigation, so that readers can see the whole
project. There is the need, too, to answer important questions about
the project. It is also time for another milestone, seven years
after my last book, and, while I have done less research into texts,
I have moved forward in my understanding of my findings. Unpublished
papers, most of them presented at recent conferences, are published
here. The invention of the Internet is one more piece of good
fortune attending my investigation: I might otherwise have had to
leave my final work unpublished.

Only one thing worries me now and that is that I have never had an
opportunity to teach my working methods. I sometimes doubt whether
anyone beyond my time would be in a position to use them with the
discipline I have had to learn, and I hope I will be proved wrong. A
colleague once asked me, “What do you do about the people who can’t
see these things?” All I can say is that no one can simply “see
these things”: we have to learn how to do so and the learning
process is a slow one. A quick answer will be a wrong answer. But
this is exciting work for anyone wanting to enlarge their
understanding of the roles of narrative in human life.